


Bitter and Sick

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: ohsam, Demon Dean, Hurt Sam Winchester, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Sam Winchester on Demon Blood, implied wincest, tough love?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 23:53:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7953976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Demon!Dean takes care of a strung-out, in-withdrawal-from-demon-blood Sam. </p><p>The key is not to quit cold turkey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bitter and Sick

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the ohsam Triple Play challenge last year (2015) for the prompt 
> 
> 1\. Setting is author's choice  
> 2\. Dean  
> 3\. Forced/tricked into ingesting demon blood 
> 
> by Lady Korana

Sam’s vision is already coming apart in thready reds and pinks when Dean shows up. The barkeep smacks the counter thrice in quick succession: like Morse code, secret magic alphabet designed to set things rattling in Sam’s brain. He smells beer and blood and something darker in the stained wood against which he’s slumped; something terrible. He thinks he’ll throw up. His skin flushes with heat, he shivers with cold—it’s as if somebody’s thrust a finger in his brain and is swirling it around in there. His mouth still tastes like blood, but this time his own: somewhere between the last two vicious stabs of pain to his eyeballs, he’d bitten his tongue.  
  
“I’ll take it from here,” says Dean. He’s got a big gun, a smile like the sun. His arm is strong under Sam’s good arm, his feet steady. _Oh, Sammy,_ he says, bite-you-bloody fond. Sam can’t see a thing in front of him, let alone stand. He’s vaguely aware of felted tables and clinking bottles and sharp, inhuman laughter. String lights fizzle in his vision with auroral potency. The old jukebox in the corner’s playing something that’s mostly just unfettered warbling and screaming. Sam feels hands on him as they pass, hears whispers about the Devil and his Cage and his own tenancy there. A sweaty guy shoving rashers into his face calls out to Dean, friendly, his eyes black and bulging like a beetle.   
  
Dean roughs him through the door. “How much did you drink anyway, Sammy?”  
  
Dean’s voice is booming in his head; a proclamation; messianic thunder. Sam tries to shape words, but he just slurs something. And he isn’t sure of the answer anyway. One shot mixed with whiskey, before he started protesting. Before they tied him up. He’s not sure since then. It felt long—forever—he’s got the, the _blood_ , all over his front and smeared into his face and tracking his skin like the glory marks of addiction. His throat burns from the pressure of fingers. Sometime in the recent past, the world began to do that trick of listing farther the more you tried to make it steady. Everything started to feel like being on a Tilt-a-Whirl: dizzying colours, fragmentary bliss, mostly horror.   
  
“Dean, I—s-spat out m-more than I—”  
  
“Oh, I’m the last person you need to justify this to, Sam, remember?”  
  
One of the girls outside the bar reaching out to grab playfully at them has whipping wet green hair and teeth like a shark. Her smile is obscene; he meets her eyes and is disoriented for a second, sees vicious glimpses of flesh and tongue and blood—  
  
 _This one likes to choke, he does,_ she sings. _We like the ones who like it rough._  
  
Her nails whip out to dig at his skin, but Dean’s too quick, and they’re stumbling down the steps now, squelching through the mud, the red of the roadhouse’s lights following them all the way to the Impala.   
  
“Sloppy,” comments Dean, strapping Sam’s seatbelt on, tugging indifferently at the rope binding his arms together. “But also impressive. How did you find this place?”  
  
“S-search The W-web,” Sam stutters out, teeth chattering now, the withdrawal truly setting in. He meets Dean’s gaze full on, doesn’t look away at that cheap demon parlour trick of black sliding away to green.   
  
“What were you doing in there?”  
  
Sam forces his voice into a semblance of calm. “Looking for you.”  
  
Dean’s smile is wide as the Cheshire cat. “Well, you found me.”  
  
“How—how did you find me?”  
  
Dean grins, disconcertingly. “I always will, little brother,” he says. “Now. How about we make this less painful   
for you?”  
  
*****

The water is terror.   
  
Steam hisses; Sam’s head smacks the copper edges of the tub when he tries to escape the burn, the ringing in his bones, the winding spasm that rips through his skin. He gasps, his body arches under the water. The wooden cross smashes into his chin, his broken hand slams into the side: for a moment, the pain is exquisite. Between heartbeats, the tub becomes a river, a reef, a hallucinatory ocean. Sam drowns in it; feels his lungs inflate like water balloons. He screams for mercy at an unknown addressee. Gets more water in him. It brands him, going down, it’s killing him—  
  
—and _please_ , Dean, _Jesus—_  
  
He comes up coughing, choking; his spine snaps forward; he leans over the lip of the bathtub and throws up red—bloody-black-red—though he only catches a glimpse of it scattershotting the fancy carpet before his vision goes gauzy and speckled with stars.  
  
The ceiling’s on fire—but then it’s not—there are blades in the water—and then there aren’t.  
  
Hallucination.  
  
Dean’s got gloves on, waits away till Sam sinks boneless and unsplashing, immobile as a cut-pupp  
et. Then he fishes out the crucifix, says _just like I thought._ He offers a hand, benediction, five fingers crooked in Sam’s slip-sliding aesthesis, a pattern not matched by Sam’s hand yet.  
  
Sam can pretend, at this moment.   
  
With every inch of his being, he can pretend, it’s easy, it feels good. He can pretend that this is still Dean—doing what he does ( _take care of you, I’ll take care of you, I’ve got you, Sammy, you look exhausted, you look like shit, come lie down and I’ll take care of you_ )  
  
—don’t ask him, don’t make him explain, don’t burst the bubble, don’t break the charm—  
  
“Dean,” Sam rasps. “Why are you helping me?”  
  
Not as poisonous as Sam wanted it to be, but Dean blinks just the same. His eyebrows rise. He looks puzzled, himself, like he’s peeped through a hole he shouldn’t have, and has now lost his bearings at whatever visceral depravity he saw.   
  
Then he grins.  
  
“The secret is, not to quit cold turkey,” says Dean. “Wean it off. I’ll teach you.”  
  
***  
  
There’s a game on in the TV outside. Wild cheering. The place is fancy—there’s a crystal glass sitting on a counter when Dean manhandles him out of the tub. Art deco tiles, glimmering blue-red light through tall, sharp windows like a church. Everything shimmers as if in a dream.  
  
“Bites?” Pink tongues of meat, on a silver plate. Sam shakes his head.   
  
“Be easier to wash it down,” says Dean. His feet are on the glass tea-table, tracking dirt. He sticks out against the opulence of this place, jacketed and mud-booted, indelicate. He’s still got gloves on; white like a surgeon.  
  
Drip, drip, drip—blood into glass. Vodka.   
  
Sam eyes it—his heart rebels—he can’t hear anything through the rushing in his head.  
  
“I’m not—I _won’t_.”  
  
A smear of blood sits on the swan-neck stem of the glass when Dean offers it to him.  
  
“ _Dean_ —”  
  
Shiver down the spine. His bones feel like they’re rattling in the casing of his skin. Sam folds his hands into fists.   
  
“Don’t be stupid,” sneers Dean. “There’s too much of it in your system for you to quit now.”  
  
 _You’re practically one of us_ , mouths Dean.   
  
It feels wrong, but for the wrong reason.   
  
“You’re still in there, somewhere,” says Sam. Stupid faith. His voice breaks. Dean just looks amused.  
  
“Always the optimist, Sam.”  
  
Sam’s eyes rove. The door is open, golden light crackling and coupling with shadow out there—  
  
Escape.   
  
They look at each other for a minute. Then, Sam tries to go for it.   
  
_Run._  
  
Stupid as fuck, and he almost gets there, but the hand Dean twists behind him is the broken one—the pain in his shoulder is a hacksaw—and Dean turns him around, crow-eyed, jams that crucifix against Sam’s throat—  
  
—and his entire body _revolts_ , repels. It's atomic torment—hate fills his vision, blistering red, something crawls through him like it lives in its skin—something trying to split him open—  
  
(Spin them around and fly them into a _wall_ —)  
  
Impact.   
  
Dean grabs him, but Sam’s shoulders stutter against the wall, staccato bone-snap. His head whips forward. It hurts.  
  
“Do you see?” Dean asks, holding Sam’s face, his mouth a snarl.

The chandelier in the room swings violently.  
  
Sam chokes on cement-dust and paint-chips and his own horror. His momentum goes from lightspeed to vacuum; on the inside of his head glass crashes.  
  
Sam sees. He _sees._  
  
***  
  
Here are things to cross out from memory:  
  
—silver knife, silver glass; _don’t try to hide the taste I’ll know it anyway_ ; blood. Thick, tongue-cloying—he swallows because he’s forced to swallow, his mouth bitter and sick—in this doorway, in another doorway, in the bathroom under the striated lampshade.  
  
Spill it over— _oops, sorry, sorry, sorry, Dean_ —curl into yourself, don’t think don’t think don’t think—  
  
— _there was a fairy-tale about a yellow road and a woman slated to marry a murderer and the murderer made her drink and drink and drink until she fell down dead._ Sorry about this, sorry about the cuts on your skin, sorry about this new crappy thing, Dean, sorry. Sorry about the creatures that took genesis from here: the addiction monster, the Devil-That-Was, the soulless one, the mess. The Lancelot-That-Wasn’t, the casket for a festering angel—everything started because of this, because _here, drink this, swallow this._  
  
Always a consequence. Always a hedgerow of thorns.  
  
Should have known. Would have been different if you didn’t—  
  
(Didn’t what, Sam?)  
  
(—put me through Hell again—I miss the fire.)  
  
A phone ringing, a shower beating (hot, _hotter_ ) and _Dr. Sexy M.D_ on TV—and glass, then vial, then spoon.  
  
_(Should I do the airplane thing again?)_  
  
Just one more spoon.  
  
Cross out. Cross out. Cross out.  
  
***  
  
His fingers are legato on the marble top, smooth, flowing; vision sharp. Fire in his veins still, downcast eyes; shadows. Shoulders feel heavy. Legs like jelly.  
  
He needs sleep.  
  
He’s standing in a strange bathroom in front of a strange mirror in a strange hotel that looks like Crowley might have picked it out, and Dean stands with him. The bruising on his shoulder is blue, red, yellow. The shiny circular divots of bullet wounds smattered across his torso like constellations are silver.  
  
They say pain is an abstract noun—but here’s a whole spectrum of color.  
  
“Papercut,” whispers Dean. Finger-cut. Single smear. Sam licks it up: makes no difference, now, makes no  
difference. "Look now. Look."  
  
And Sam’s afraid to look at his own face, he is, feels forewarned like Bluebeard’s bride—every room in the castle except this one—but now he does. Beyond the faint burn-shadow of the cross, beyond stained mouth.  
  
His eyes are hazel. Wide, wet: it stays hazel even when he keeps blinking it. The relief is almost transcendental; Sam nearly slumps into the gold-striped marble.  
  
“Told you,” says Dean, big-brother smirk parody. His eyes aren’t green.  
  
Sam stands, steady. Fingers don’t shake. No hallucinations waiting at the corner of his eyes to jump him.  
  
“ _Thank you_ ,” Dean mocks. “Will be nice.”  
  
Sam shudders—feels small, terrible, like a little scolded child. He feels something twist inside of him, a pain that isn’t physical, that isn’t some after-effect of demon-blood. Something bigger.  
  
“You should—come home, Dean. I can fix you. I can fix this.”  
  
Dean laughs. "But I don't want to be fixed! See how easy things are when you take the emotion out of them?"  
  
_You haven't taken the emotion out_ , Sam thinks. “I’ll just find you again. I’ll keep finding you, and I’ll bring you home, Dean.”  
  
Dean's eyes widen in mirth.  
  
“You gotta be able to remember this first, Sammy.”  
  
His fist comes up, fast, swinging.  
  
And then suddenly, darkness.  
  
Only darkness.


End file.
